In Europe, there 9 languages listed as nearly extinct, with 26 in serious danger and a further 38 in danger.

In North-East Asia, 2 are possibly extinct, 19 nearly extinct, 8 in serious danger and 13 more in danger.

The situation in Africa, South America and Asia and Pacific seems to be worse.

It seems inevitable that many languages will die out with the advent of globalised society. Is there anything that can be done about these languages? Transnational languages will exert an increasing pressure on them. Will the benefits of increased communication compensate for the loss of many small languages?

2 Comments

Languages documentation can be done through Ardano , it's not a big documenting project ,because it is designed to document only few words from every language , but it's a very good example not just on documenting a word from a language but even to make the word in everyday use.
Words from living languages that will die in the future will be their in the dictionary and might be used in normal conversation and that will make us revive some of them at least by using a single word.
Another word from a flourishing language will be used more frequently ,but the word from the dead language will continue to be documented as word in Ardano
Ardano is a new project and needs support.
Some discussions about Ardano project are in Ardano group on Yahoo

Sites like Ethnologue ( http://www.ethnologue.com/ ) have already documented thousands of languages, so I don't see that including a few examples of each in a dictionary of an artificial language will achieve that much.